BEIJING, June 5 (Reuters) - Xinhuanet, owned

by China's official Xinhua news agency, plans to invest over 1.1

billion yuan ($162.38 million) on an "authoritative" AI agent to

help promote President Xi Jinping's thinking, Shanghai Stock

Exchange filings showed.

The project, known as "Xinhua Yudian," meaning Xinhua

lexicon, is "an intelligent agent for learning, researching, and

disseminating Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese

Characteristics for a New Era," the company said.

Driven by mainstream values and dedicated to "spreading the

positive voice," the agentic AI will also provide users with

current affairs and political news content to help them deal

with information overload and "a dilemma of trust in

distinguishing truth from falsehood".

China in March launched a sweeping "AI+" blueprint to

encourage the adoption of artificial intelligence across all

sectors of the economy. It also follows previous tech-driven

efforts to broaden the reach of official state ideology among an

online-savvy younger generation.

In 2019, China rolled out a hit propaganda app known as

"Xuexi Qiangguo," which literally translates as "Study to make

China strong." At one point after its launch, it overtook WeChat

and the Chinese version of TikTok to become the most popular app

on Apple's China app store.

Xinhua's proposed agentic AI will present the essence of

Xi's discourses to its users, who can rely on the tool as a

politically sensitive citation checker, ensuring references to

Xi's words "in official document writing and policy

interpretation are accurate and error-free."

To be built on the state-run news agency's "pure and clean"

corpus library, the AI will help deliver the party's voice to

all sectors of Chinese society, lending further support to

"consolidating the ideological and public opinion foundation,"

the company said.

($1 = 6.7743 Chinese yuan renminbi)